I actually disagree with the second season being a "must watch". I was just discussing the show with a friend after having watched the second season, and we both seemed to agree that these episodes had taken a much different direction than the first season. My guess would be that they are catering to a different audience. Many of the edits were sensationalized in a way I find inappropriate and unnecessary for a nature documentary (panning into a capybara's face while foolish music plays to emphasize his "disbelief", off screen dramatic "crunch" noises of a predator eating prey, etc). There are countless attempts made to "humanize" the behavior of the animals featured on the show, or else project human taboos onto their behavior. Like, since when did we agree that it was acceptable to censor an animal making a kill while hunting? The fuck? It was almost like they were attempting to put together some kind of cohesive action drama hollywood storyline that just doesn't exist in the context of a nature doc or even make sense. Quite frankly, it seems the producers (or whoever the hell is in charge over there) have really dumbed down the series to cater to an audience that I guess we're assuming couldn't possibly sit through a nature doc series without being spoon fed emotions via editing that essentially makes a nature show into some sort of sitcom, with the only thing missing being the laugh track. Anyway, I'm not sure why I'm so bitter about it (lol), I was just so disappointed because I loved the minimalism of the first season so much! I already like watching animals in their natural habitat BBC, I don't need all the extra shit, I just want to see animals being animals, is that too much to ask these days without people projecting their image onto everything? I don't know, I was just disappointed with it overall. But it's not the animals' fault.
So one thing I also noticed was that each animal had a dramatic mini-story along with it, like the camera crew caught each one at the very beginning of its intrepid (but really routine) adventure to try to fuck or kill something. It's likely that the footage is spun and edited to fit a particular exciting narrative, and although it's "unnatural" similar to your concern about the overall sensationalism, I don't actually have a problem with it. You can't deny that the storytelling thing that they're doing is really well done. It's gripping, beautiful, funny, and not always predictable from the average Netflix viewer's perspective. If you're a big nature documentary buff or something, I guess there's a lot of cringe-worthy material here, but it's clearly not an academic work. To someone who just generally loves the idea of sloths heroically crossing rivers just to get it on, it's amazing!